The City Times is proud to revive a monthly history piece compiled by local history enthusiast Glynis Cox Millett-Clay, which she has named Benoni Bygones.
Benoni was an isolated settlement between 1887 and 1907, with roads that were little more than cart tracks in the veld and it was considered a ‘sleepy hollow’.
The general opinion was that civilisation ended in Boksburg and Benoni was an inaccessible little village near the New Kleinfontein Mine.
In 1907, the town was proclaimed a municipality, and it was also the year labour unrest first reared its head.
Six years later, in May 1913, the largest strike which the country had ever known began in Benoni when EH Bulman, the new manager of Kleinfontein mine, and his new underground manager, HC Whitehead, decided that five underground mechanics’ working hours would be extended from 12:30 to 15:30 on Saturday afternoons.
This decision had a rippling effect, and on June 10, led to a general strike of 19 000 miners on 63 Rand Mines.
The strike ended a month later but left a trail of devastation in Benoni as miners went on the rampage, burning, plundering and razing buildings.
By 1916, Benoni had gained a reputation as a ‘wild’ town because of this violence and its rowdy political rallies and Benoni was proclaimed ‘a place where strikes were born’.
The worst was yet to come.
New Year’s Day 1922 ushered in the start of ‘The Red Revolt’ or ‘1922 Strike’ that involved all mineworkers on the Reef.
The chief cause of the strike was the decision of mining magnates to cut miners’ wages because of the falling gold price.
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Benoni citizens suffered a heavy toll as those miners or ‘scabs‘ who attempted to go to work, had their houses and possessions burnt and were ostracised by their fellow workers.
On March 11, a South African Air Force aircraft circled over Benoni and dropped four bombs. One bomb wrecked the Park Café on the corner of Woburn Avenue and Bunyan Street, killing Maria Magdalena Truter, a resident of an adjacent house.
Another bomb went through the roof of the mine workers’ hall, wrecking the kitchen.
One failed to explode, and another hit the courthouse.
Benoni was the only town to be targeted and bombed from the air.
Martial law was eventually declared by the government, and the police and military ended the strike in violent encounters on March 14.
(Source: BCT article and others/retyped and edited by Glynis Cox Millett-Clay).
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